Eshu Marneedi

Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge:

We seem to be entering into an AI agent renaissance. Meta’s new consumer-facing AI agent, Muse, topped the App Store charts soon after its release and has 600,000 daily active users in the US, by an Apptopia estimate. And AI agent platform Instinct, whose eponymous creator is fundraising at a $2.5 billion valuation, has been making the rounds in the tech industry. Under the hood, though, there are some obvious similarities to the platform that started it all: OpenClaw.

For the past week or so, some social media users have alleged that Muse is directly built on OpenClaw. The two platforms use the same names for core files (SOUL.md, memory, tools, etc.), and have a lot of similar lines in the doc that governs personality, tone, and more (“Be genuinely helpful, not performatively helpful”). They also have a similar design. One Redditor argued that “Muse is just a wrapper app built on top of” OpenClaw — alleging it probably also came with that platform’s significant security risks. “Only non-tech ppl are buying the hype.”

Meta has denied the claims. Nat Friedman, head of product for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs wrote on X that Meta built Muse “from scratch.” He did, however, acknowledge Muse is “heavily inspired as a product” by OpenClaw. After he first used OpenClaw in January, he said, he purchased hundreds of Mac Minis for his team at Meta. And with Muse, he aimed to build a similar platform “that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people.” As for why the OpenClaw file names and lines carried over, Friedman said the team believed that OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger had gotten those things “exactly right.”

I’ve tried Muse after Meta’s incessant promotion of the new product via Instagram. (The advertisement tells you how many of your friends are using it, in an apparent effort to peer pressure you into downloading the app¹.) The product is almost a one-to-one clone of OpenClaw, though running on Meta’s own virtual machine in the cloud. The apps are much better than the vibe-coded slop OpenClaw has been churning out, and generally Muse makes for the best agentic artificial intelligence experience. It has its own browser, can connect to a variety of Model Context Protocol servers, and can use open-source command-line utilities.

But all of this ignores that Muse is now the fourth agentic AI experience of its kind hailed as the future of human-computer interaction. First OpenClaw, then Gemini Spark in May, then Hermes Agent over the summer. None of these products have achieved mass-market appeal, despite being hawked by major consumer software companies like Google and Microsoft. The reason for this is really quite simple: nobody knows what to do with them. I, someone who writes about and studies computers, have no legitimate use for any of these agentic tools. Over the last month, the most compelling use case people have seemed to come up with for Muse is sifting through email, but even that has proven to be error-prone.

To be clear, I don’t blame this on Meta’s (irrefutably) substandard models: OpenClaw running OpenAI’s flagship models seems to present the same overall utility issue. I’d reckon most people hire human personal assistants to run errands and handle simple chores. Muse is not only unable to do anything in the physical world — like cashing checks, picking up packages, etc. — but it’s painfully limited on the web. Amazon and many other sites block Muse and other AI crawlers from placing orders. And no average person on the planet would ever entrust an AI model to handle sensitive bank account and financial information. So what’s left of Muse’s utilities usually boils down to email and expensive cron jobs. The OpenClaw moment failed, and so will this one.

This brings me to this year’s Meta Connect, which went better than years prior but still fell short of assuaging concerns that Meta can no longer make compelling consumer products. Here’s Jacob Kastrenakes for The Verge:

Meta is building a dedicated hardware device for its new Muse AI agent. The product, called Muse Charm, was briefly shown off by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the end of tonight’s Meta Connect presentation. It looks almost like a chunky smartwatch without the strap — just a big screen, plus a little lanyard for carrying the device around.

The Muse Charm has a fingerprint sensor on the top right corner that you can press to activate and begin speaking to the agent. There appears to be a small camera on the device as well, plus what looks like at least three holes for microphones on the front. Zuckerberg said you don’t have to unlock a phone or open an app to use the Charm, but he didn’t share how it’s actually connecting to Meta’s servers.

In fact, Zuckerberg shared very little about the Muse Charm, other than that it should be on sale by December. I have written about Meta’s shiny-object syndrome quite a few times now, and it couldn’t be more apparent that this is an ill-conceived idea by a distracted, hyperactive Zuckerberg. In real life, far away from Menlo Park, people are defacing advertisements for Meta Ray-Ban glasses because people are using them to harass women. This is the astounding opinion people seem to have about Meta hardware. Before that, Meta almost canned its famed metaverse initiative — the one it literally renamed the company after. It is safe to say that Meta’s track record of producing compelling, high-quality hardware is non-existent. It had exactly one good idea — glasses with cameras — and its tendency toward shiny-object syndrome destroyed even the smidgen of goodwill it built. All of this is to say that I don’t think you’ll find people walking around with Muse Charms in their pockets anytime soon.

What I assume you will find is people throwing out their Meta glasses in droves — or better yet, not buying them at all — because Muse will be integrated into them in the coming months. I do think it’s interesting that Meta at least understands that people are wary of AI-connected cameras on everyone’s faces, thereby inspiring the camera-less Meta glasses also announced at Connect, but the company again misses the mark. The problem wasn’t the cameras — it was AI, particularly Meta’s implementation of it. People are distrustful of Meta as a company in general and “Big Tech” writ large, and I just can’t see a future for a controversial technology developed by a controversial company. No amount of groundbreaking technology will change that.